She penned 23 letters in all, from September 13, 1851, through November 21, 1852, describing life at Rich Bar and nearby Indian Bar, on the ‘East Branch of the North Fork of Feather River,’ roughly 120 miles northeast of Sacramento, in present-day Plumas National Forest. ‘Really, everybody ought to go to the mines just to see how little it takes to make people comfortable in the world,’ Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clapp wrote from the mines in California, to her sister Molly in New England. All the preparations in terms of constitution and legislature were made in 1849 and California became a state in 1850. The gold also helped to speed up the admission of California into the US as a State. In the beginning, property rights in the goldfields were not covered by law and this was solved by the system of staking claims. The gold rush resulted in the hasty development of California: many roads, churches, schools and towns were built to accommodate the gold-diggers.
The best results were achieved with hydraulic mining although it was environmentally damaging. The gold rush peaked in 1852 and after that the gold reserves were getting thinner and harder to reach so that more sophisticated methods of mining had to be employed. Soon the others from the rest of US, Europe, Australia and China followed and since they mainly arrived during 1849 they were called the “forty-niners”.Īt first, the gold could be picked up from the ground but later on it was recovered from the streams and rivers with the use of pans. People from Oregon, Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii) and Latin America were the first to hear the breaking news, so they were the first to arrive in order to test their luck in California by the end of 1848. Marshall found gold on his piece of land at Sutter’s Mill in Coloma.
It all started on January 24, 1848, when James W. Explore articles from the History Net archives about California Gold RushĬalifornia Gold Rush summary: The California Gold Rush was the largest mass migration in American history since it brought about 300,000 people to California.
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